@dean_palmer
I believe it’s been said many times before, that ‘hi-fi’ comes from the term high fidelity, and that high fidelity is about bringing the original signal from source to ear with as little added and taken away as possible….with as little added or taken away as possible.
There are many different facets to our amazing hobby, and to deprecate or belittle any fellow hobbyist for spending too little or too much is to miss the point - there are simply too many ways we enjoy and love our hobby of music appreciation! However, in very much the same vein, if adjusting the original signal, either by intention or through lack of knowledge, to our individual preferences and likes by way of bass and treble controls as example, we cannot, in all self-honesty and good conscience, refer to what is being done as high fidelity. It should by no means exclude anyone from the hobby in its delightful entirety; it merely basically and honestly means that one does not then engage the hobby with high fidelity as the heart and soul.
High fidelity obviously isn’t all about spending huge amounts of money, but the path to adding or taking away as little as possible from the original signal is a very difficult task, and one fraught with the use of technologies and materials that allow the best flow of current/signal with the least amount of degradation, while not adding colouration - this balance is what makes the search for high fidelity relatively expensive, terribly debatable, contentious, confusing, frustrating, and ultimately, exciting.
How does one know when a signal one hears, the original content of which one is usually unknowledgeable about, is close to its origins? I have found that it is gained through a lot of experience listening to many many different kinds of music and equipment in the chain of one’s own system in the specific context of one’s own listening space, but with a vital proviso - that our musical choices also include source recordings recognised by sound engineers and other experienced or professional individuals associated with the field as being the most accurate, well-recorded samples of all musical genres available. With these as the gauge of excellence, we test equipment in an acoustically appropriate space that brings those recordings ever closer to reality in our ears, in relation to the entire spectrum of what realism means - frequency range, detail, timbre, soundfield, the rest of it.
The argument that denies an objective perception of reality due to the fact we each hear reality in different ways is a flawed argument - while we each may hear differently, the sources for what each of us identifies as ‘real’ from unrecorded and direct experience, is all the same - it does mean that we all have the same aural foundations for what we each individually hear as ‘real’. The innate understanding of what constitutes reality has been cultivated within each of us from completely shared sources from the moment we are born.
With a good range from various musical genres of universally accepted as acclaimed exceptional recordings, coupled with our innate abilities to identify realism, we can thus begin the journey of recognising equipment, cables, listening environments, that bring us closer to what we can each sufficiently accept as high fidelity. There will be a huge range of what this constitutes, nonetheless, as we each have different priorities, budgets, experience levels, equipment chains, and listening spaces to allow for. It is what makes any degree of consensus over what truly constitutes high fidelity so very difficult.
The questions it all boils down to is this - how many of us have had the privilege of actually listening to more than 10 kinds of, say, speaker or interconnect cables ranging from five hundred to a hundred thousand dollars, one a a time, in the same equipment chain in the specificity of each our listening spaces? Or the same for a variety of DACs ranging from five thousand to a hundred and twenty thousand dollars? Or amplifiers? Or servers? Or preamps and switches? Or fuses and isolation devices?
It is neither fair nor knowledgeable to claim an absence of difference or a law of diminishing returns purely on the basis of how good each our systems already sound or on what theory tells us, if our listening skills have not been exercised to a sufficiently high level, or we have not actually heard any item under discussion in our own systems, in our own listening spaces, under controlled conditions.
A golden rule I learned, is that things never ever sound half as good as what we already have, when heard in an unfamiliar environment. I try never to fall prey to dismissing any one thing just because it sounded awful in someone else’s space, or showroom, if nothing else, for the simple fact it is an entirely unfamiliar system and listening space to me. There may be one or two items in an unfamiliar system I may have had experience with, which under certain circumstances, may be determined to be either unrelated or be contributing to the cause of a systems performance, but it is very rarely the case that I can fully know, until specific items under study are heard in my own system and listening room without any change to any other part of my system.
I love this hobby, and being especially in the pursuit of high fidelity, I encourage any one in search of a skill to better, to be that of listening, because the joy it has given me the past four years in my slow but steady climb to getting lost in the music, has been greater than almost anything else I have ever experienced. Just know what it is you seek, what it is you can afford, what it is you may not honestly know, and what it is you do know through direct experience in your own listening space; and you will not fool yourself into blindly following or being caught up in a dominant paradigm of belief. Simply because, while beliefs are predicated on singular viewpoints or opinions, deeper truth, being based on the relationships between multiple viewpoints, allows one to access greater perception of entirety and thus, a more balanced understanding of where high fidelity sits in the pantheon of our wonderful hobby.
Few things in life are more demanding or exhausting as building a system of high fidelity - It takes tremendous effort, passion, and a toll on time and expenses unlike anything else. It’s the easy way out to claim that top of the line nordost or any other cable makes little to no difference to sound quality just because it was too difficult or costly to audition it in one’s own system. There is no short cut.
The trick in the journey of high fidelity is to find occasion to forget it all in being in the moment, when all that time, effort, money and the trained ear vanishes, because both conscious and unconscious has been lost in the music.
In friendship - kevin
